


Equinox

by vacant houses (the_lost_robot)



Series: Fractured [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Friendsheith, Gen, Keith (Voltron)-centric, Season 3 AU, Shiro (Voltron)-centric, Supernatural Elements, White Paladin Shiro, the gang's all here though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-23
Updated: 2017-09-23
Packaged: 2019-01-04 07:13:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12164052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_lost_robot/pseuds/vacant%20houses
Summary: There’s an entire universe inside the Black Lion.There’s a ghost in the Black Lion’s cockpit.OR:The path back home is never straightforward.





	Equinox

There’s an entire universe inside the Black Lion.

He’s brought there by flashes of light, jolts of agony and snarls of lightening. A plain of purple stars stretches as far as the eye can see. It’s peacefully here, calm and undisturbed though his arrival mars the astral realm violently. The sky is ripped asunder by the frantic actions of a Lion desperate to preserve its paladin by any means necessary.

One moment: hectic battle. The next: an endless field of alien constellations that may or may not exist.

Beneath it all: the depths. An obsidian sea of darkness that has no end.

He doesn’t know how he got here or why. His body feels…strange. Lighter than it should be. One idle thought and he flickers himself a mile away before the impulse has fully formed in his mind. When he’d last visited this place, he’d been bound by his physical limits, even though Zarkon hadn’t been. He’d figured the Galra emperor simply had more experience navigating in this realm and with time and training, he’d eventually adjust. He didn’t expect to gain such abilities so soon.

It’s…concerning.

It’s worrying.

This isn’t right.

He doesn’t know if there’s a way out of here. His connection to his Lion is…muted. Damaged? No, not quite. Strained might be the best way to put it. But this is the Black Lion’s domain, if anything; their connection should be stronger here.

He waits for a sign. A hint from the Black Lion of what to do next.

He waits for a long time.

* * *

 

There’s a ghost in the Black Lion’s cockpit.

He hasn’t told anyone. Isn’t sure that they’d believe him. Or if there’s anything that they could do to help.

Sometimes, when it’s late, his feet bring him down to the hangar bay and into the Lion. And inside…

His eyes are playing tricks on him. That’s what it always feels like. It’s late; he’s tired and dead on his feet. He’s heartsick, full of wishful thinking and standing in a place that he has never wanted to claim, knowing what the cost would be to put him there.

Of course, he sees a ghost.

It…isn’t what he was expecting to a ghost to look like. Though honestly, this is space and space is just very, very weird and he should have learnt this by now. Instead of a transparent image of Shiro, it’s a Shiro-shaped cloud composed of tiny specks of light. It shimmers and twinkles in the pilot’s seat, a glittering cascade of the smallest stars he has ever seen. The way it billows reminds him a little of dust caught in a sunbeam, the rare afternoons when he’d bothered to clean up his shack and disturbed built up layers of dirt.

Aside from the first time, he never touches it. Hope had swelled in him, that all was not lost then-

His hand had passed harmlessly through the cloud of light and it had been a cold shock to the system. There had been no sensation, no recognition that there was anything there at all aside from what he could see. He’d strained all his other senses, nothing. Nothing at all. Not even the slightest prickle from that the strange place in the back of his head that had led him into the desert and to Blue in the first place.

It’s late. He’s tired. Just a trick of the mind.

A consistent, persistent one.

It’s here every time he visits the hangar long into the Castle’s night cycle. He’s tried talking to it every now and again but there’s no response. No acknowledgement. No sign that it knows that he’s there.

Sometimes he thinks he should say something to the rest of the team.

But.

Simply put, if there was a way for the Black Lion to have brought Shiro back to them, whole and sound, the Lion would have done it by now. He knows the lengths Red would go for him, the times the Red Lion had flown across space to rescue him. He may not know this Lion as well but what binds them together is their shared loved for the Black paladin. It’s what had opened the Lion up to him the first time, spat out of a corrupted wormhole on a desolate planet. So long as he flies to live up to the legacy Shiro has left behind him, the Lion will respond to him.

Whatever this, it’s the best the Lion can do. They’ve only seen a small glimpse of the Black Lion’s abilities, the wings that can phase it through the heart of a battleship. It’s the tip of an iceberg; they know that there is more underneath. And the Black Lion knows that he’d give anything to bring Shiro back – if it was a matter of working with a paladin to unlock those hidden abilities, it would have nudged and guided him towards what needed to be done.

This is it.

It’s not enough.

* * *

 

Signs are in short supply in the astral realm. Or perhaps they are overly abundant. Stars are everywhere and those can be guides, right? But if one is meant to be meaningful, how could he ever hope to pick one out when everywhere he turns and looks, there’s just more stars?

He wanders past gas giants. Flickers through a cluster of white dwarves. He sits and watches the birth of a nebula.

The awe he felt for the cosmos, back when he was earth bound and blissfully unaware of just how big and dangerous space was, never lessens. But concern and worry grows as time slips away from him here.

It is beautiful here, absolutely stunning. It’s safe, peaceful, things that had been sorely lacking in his life as of late. He could stare at the constellations out here and never have enough.

But he has a team, people depending on him and there’s a universe out there that needs defending. No matter how tempting, he can’t stay here and let his life drift away.

He just needs to find a way out.

Something far below stirs.

* * *

 

You have to let go.

He tells himself this daily. Let go. For the good of the team. For the universe. Shiro wanted this, if the worst came to past.

Which it had.

You’ve lost so many things before, what’s one more? You can do this.

The words ring hollow. But he rolls out of bed, leaves his room and thus starts another day in the life of team Voltron.

* * *

 

It’s easy to lose track of time here.

He doesn’t know how long it’s been since he arrived here. He doesn’t know how far he’s travelled. Sometimes he walks, sometimes he teleports. Gravity is optional here, he figures out. He can jump and float and stay in the air for miles.

Yet no matter how far he roams, it doesn’t feel like he’s any closer to making it out of here.

His bond with the Black Lion has remained strained all this time. There has been no signals of what he should be doing, no comforting purrs in his head from his Lion. He doesn’t understand why he’s been abandoned. He sits and meditates and tries to draw a connection with it-

Nothing.

He might as well be shouting into the void.

…He has tried shouting into the void. Results yielded thus far: 0. 

But there is one direction he hasn’t tried yet.

Below.

* * *

 

Sometimes, he wonders if they are fighting a losing battle.

Voltron undeniably is fantastically powerful – the universe’s greatest weapon still despite ten thousand years of scientific (and magical?) advancement. It constantly amazes him that Voltron is more than a match to stand up to the Galra - stand up and _win_. That the fights are long and difficult speaks more to the fortitude of Galran engineering than weakness on Voltron’s part.

This is an ancient relic from a bygone era – it should have been surpassed in those long ten thousand years and yet it hasn’t.

Still – an amazing powerful superweapon can only be in one place at a time and the universe is impossibly vast. The Galra Empire controls most of it – the task that they have assigned themselves is one long enough for several life-times. If by some miracle they all live to the end of their natural lives, the sheer scope of it alone could keep them occupied to their graves.

It’s not just taking out the Galra. War isn’t that simple. The aftermath is messy and complicated. How do they ensure liberated planets are able to stand on their own feet? That what they leave behind isn’t going to fall apart and the planet is right back where it started. Not every civilisation is content to look to themselves and lick their wounds in peace. Scarce resources or just plain ol’ aggression might have them eyeballing their newly freed neighbours.

New oppressors, same tune.

It’s not just about making a difference; it’s making sure that difference sticks and is a positive one for as many people as possible.

These are the thoughts that he leans on when it gets too much, that keep him focused and on-track.

This is not the first time he’s carried this hurt, nursed this wound on his gaping heart. It should be easier, he thinks but it isn’t.

This time, he has hope and it’s both a blessing and a curse. He’d thought Shiro had died once and been proven wrong. So he can’t smother the hope for a second miracle, another chance that the person who has never given up on him could come back somehow. Not when there’s an unresponsive shimmer in the Black Lion’s cockpit. But it’s been weeks – _months_ \- of no change and he needs to let this candle blow out. He can’t mourn properly; lay his dead to rest like they belong.

As the days pass, bit by bit, he tucks away the hurt, settling into a bleak equilibrium. He cultivates his sorrows in the dead of the night when he’s beholden to no one but himself. In the day, he’s the leader, reluctantly crowned but duty bound. He’ll do what’s needed for the mission; he knows distantly _–reluctantly-_ that it’s bigger than any one person, no matter how important. He owes it to the team, to the universe _(to Shiro)_ to carry on.

The Galra won’t give him a year in the desert to stich himself back together. He patches what he can and picks himself up.

* * *

 

He is sinking.

There is no end to the astral realm. Deeper and deeper, he descends. Violet constellations and wisps of cloud drift above him, steadily slipping out of reach. It grows darker, the further down he goes.

It should unnerve him. This darkness is infinite. It swallows up every speck of light. For the first time since he came here, his body feels leaden. Something tells him that nothing has ever escaped these pitch black depths. That the further he goes, there’s no coming back and he will be no exception.

An idle thought tests this, he wills himself to appear somewhere far above.

He slides deeper instead.

He isn’t worried. There’s a presence down here, it calls to him and it feels familiar. He’s been sharing mind-space with the Black Lion for months and even with the bond strained like it was right now, he’d know his Lion anywhere.

And he does.

This isn’t the Black Lion.

But it’s close enough that he isn’t frightened. Whatever this is, it’s buried deep within his Lion’s domain that he’s confident it won’t hurt him. Granted, Zarkon had been able to access this realm but once the Lion had made up its mind, it had been able to eject him from this space. After all the time he’s spent here, he hadn’t detected a single threat.

The presence curls up around him with a purr.

He sleeps.

* * *

 

This is definitely a trap.

But the intel had been too tempting to pass up – ‘Lotor had been sighted in the Hassevilius quadrant,’ a tall, six-limbed Regorian whispered on the night Voltron freed their home planet from Galran occupation.

He’d argued to pursue the lead. The system was home to a number of planets rich with resources. They didn’t know what the Galran prince was after but Coran had reeled off an impressively long list of possible uses for the materials.

A lot of them were to do with weaponry.

And that had been just off the top of Coran’s head, his knowledge ten thousand years out of date.

They had to go in. The team had agreed, to his relief, it hadn’t been just him fighting for this.

Sometimes, he’d wonder if Shiro would be disappointed to see the state of the team - _the state of him_. He’d always felt one step apart, his priorities out of sync with the rest of the group. Rallying the team under his lead was exhausting; he still hadn’t gotten the knack of it.

It was better now, than it had been in the past. But it had been an uphill battle all the way to get here. His outright reluctance to lead coupled with the clumsy way he struggled to connect to people hadn’t done him any favours. But he’s trying now in a way he wasn’t when the Black Lion had first responded to his touch. His heart, as much of it that he has left, is in it.

It isn’t in anything else.

To Hassevilius they go.

It’s a trap.

Of course, it is.

Lotor, if he was ever here, is long gone. But two Galra fleets are armed and waiting. They hammer the Lions as soon as they launch from their hangars. Swarms upon swarms of fighter ships attack each Lion relentlessly. Normally, the ships aren’t too much of a big deal – they’re annoying but not the biggest threat and can be taken down fairly easily.

Only – some of them don’t. These one weather a hit, a second one and more. Their purple lasers have more bite to them. The team shouldn’t be surprised really. The Galran sentries had undergone an upgrade soon after they’d tried to lure out Zarkon and trap his command ship. It was only a matter of time before the war necessitated change for the rest of the Galran forces.

What had been mild annoyances are turned into sudden problems. It’s difficult to tell which are normal fighter ships and which have been upgraded. The Blue Lion’s sonic cannon helps identify the tougher ships but the sheer numbers makes it hard to keep track of the more deadly versions, like trying to find a handful of swiftly moving needles in a shaking hay stack.

Then the Galra deploy a robeast and their problems just keep stacking up.

* * *

 

He’s trapped in an endless slumber.

Around him, the purring changes timbre. Before: comforting, peaceful. Now: alert and wary.

He stirs.

* * *

 

Each robeast has been completely different from the last and this one is no exception. It’s a round, grey mass, covered with flexible, thin spines. A number of them oscillate and somehow that propels the beast in space. It gives the robobeast an incredible amount of manoeuvrability in every direction because those spikes cover every inch and each is capable of moving independently.

The worst part is when it gets close enough to a Lion. It halts with jarring stillness, and then fires a hail of needles at its target. None of the Lions have been hit yet but they’ve seen the way those needles effortlessly torn through the small fighter ships and none of them have any desire to test their Lions armour against it. Firing slows the robobeast for a minute or so while it regenerates its coat of spikes. But before they can take advantage of that, the fighters swoop in again to serve as a distraction.

They haven’t had a chance to form Voltron. The fighters are too persistent to let up. The Blue lion clips a needle in its hindquarters and loses a degree of manoeuvrability. The enemy had been focusing on trying to take the Blue Lion out for a while now; someone on the other side had pinpointed the sonic cannon as their one advantage. The rest of the paladins converge on Allura to cover her but it’s only a matter of time before-

A concentrated spray of purple lasers, the back of the Black Lion shudders and suddenly he’s down a rear jet. Alarm spreads over the comms, the battle is sliding fast out of their favour and it’s on the tip of his tongue to call a retreat when something looms large in front of the Black Lion.

The light of the closest star catches on the metallic spines of the robeast. It bristles, preparing to fire and he knows with sudden certainty that this is _it_.

* * *

 

He sinks.

The darkness gives way beneath him.

It’s like he’d been standing on the surface of a frozen lake, the ice collapsing underneath him. Except it isn’t freezing cold water he falls into, it’s…light?

It’s painful, that’s what it is, a complete shock to the system. After so long in complete and utter nothingness, feeling any sensation at all is torture. His eyes are clamped shut, his hands planted protectively around his face.

He does this a second too late to actually do anything. The sudden light has burnt an afterimage into his eyeballs. He squeezes his eyelids tighter like it’ll do anything for the searing pain in his head. Spoiler alert: this has no impact.

Static rasps in his ears and he flinches – _what?_

It picks up in volume and he’s torn – does he cover his ears or keep trying to protect his eyes? The sound hurts, every nerve he possesses is raw and sensitised and utterly not up to handling any input. He should cover his ears, he decides, eyes have lids and can protect themselves. You can’t shut off your ears.

The decision comes a moment too soon; the choice is taken from him when the static clears enough to make out words and even though it physically _hurts_ to listen-

“-Get out of there Keith!”

“Keith, you need to move right now!”

His eyes snap open (a mistake, oh what a fucking painful mistake that was but that didn’t matter, he had a job to do) and automatically, his hands dart forward to grab the Black Lion’s controls.

That was Lance’s voice. And Pidge.

The team was in trouble.

His hands curl around the handles like he’s been sitting here waiting the entire time. At his touch, around him, the cockpit lights up and the Lion comes to life and roars.

His eyes are streaming, he’s half-blind, unused to the concept of seeing after spending so long in the dark. The details of this cockpit are a little off from what he remembers but it doesn’t matter.

He can see that there’s a bayard sitting in its dock to the left of him.

He doesn’t hesitate, he reaches for it –

_//_

The robeast bristles-

Lance and Pidge scream at him to move-

The bayard dock lights up and raises up to him-

He summons the black bayard in his right hand, plunges it into its socket and twists-

_//_

With his left hand, he grabs the bayard and twists-

_//_

In the Hassevilius quadrant, far above the planet Noaton, the Black Lion glows. Teal energy spills down the Lion’s back as a pair of shining wings manifest and extend from the ether.

For one moment, one heartbeat, the battle stills.

Inside the Black Lion’s cockpit, one hand clutching the black bayard, the other still on the controls, Keith’s vision whiteouts. Then he’s struck by double-vision, someone somehow occupies the pilot’s seat at the same time he is. Someone else’s hand holds on to the right stick, the one he’d let go off to plunge his bayard into its socket.

Their other arm…

It’s holding on to another bayard in a dock that he’s never seen before to his left.

_//_

In this strange, Not Quite Right cockpit, Shiro sees an arm that extends to his right. _Wait,_ he thinks. The Black Lion’s bayard dock should be-

_//_

The heartbeat passes.

The universe restarts.

Two bayards twist in their docks.

The Black Lion turns immaterial as the robeast fires. It slips between atoms and glides forward unconcerned about the physical world, the damaged rear thruster a long forgotten problem belonging to a whole different reality. The spikes pass harmlessly through it.

The Black Lion phases through the robeast, destroying it from the inside out.

And in its wake, a White Lion blazes a trail of starlight with a triumphant roar.

* * *

 

The tide turns.

The new Lion is a white ribbon that streams parallel to the Black Lion’s blaze of purple. They thread around each other, taking on the fighter ships with renewed vigour.

There’s a chorus of very confused voices over the comm lines.

“What the quiznak?”

“Dude, did that just happen?”

“Holy shit. What the fuck is going on?”

“Am I seeing things? Is that another lion? It’s white – Allura, you never mentioned a White lion!”

“I don’t – there’s never been a sixth lion before!”

“Keith.” And this was a voice that they’d thought they’d lost. Immediately, the comms lines went silent, the paladins hanging on for every word. “Are you alright?”

“Shiro? Keith’s confused voice was barely a hopeful exhale.

The pilot in the White Lion’s seat is struck suddenly – he’s finally made it out and back to his team. He’d missed them, stuck wandering the cosmos. Fierce fondness and overwhelming love and longing wells up inside of him and he searches for words that he hoped could express what he’s feeling in this very moment.

Searches and fails and decides to settle simply on: “I _missed_ you all.” The words seem inadequate; he lets out a shaky, disbelieving laugh.

The feeling is utterly mutual. “It’s good to have you back,” Keith breathes.

“It’s good to be back.”

There’s a Galra fleet demanding their attention but in this moment, Shiro believes that all is well with the universe and knows that he’s going home.

* * *

 

Pidge frowns over her instruments as the Green Lion weaves through battle. She’s engaged with the fight but things have eased up a little now that Shiro – _Shiro!-_ is back. She has the time to do some discrete scans and-

The readings don’t make any sense.

Each Lion has a unique energy signature. But right now, her instruments are registering the Black Lion _twice._

Her thoughts swirled, quantum entanglement, the breakdown of Euclidean dimensions or whatever it was the Black Lion did to phase itself through matter. She opens up a private channel to Coran and sends the readings through to the Castleship.

“Are you seeing this?”

* * *

 

At his station, Coran gives a sombre nod, even though there are only the mice to witness it. He’s got a wider range of equipment available to him and most of the Lions are streaming all sorts of battle data to him, he’s seeing the same thing.

“I’m not entirely sure what’s going on, Number Five,” he replies as purple lights and enemy ships blaze outside the particle barrier. “But you are absolutely right, the energy signatures are identical.”

He has no idea what this could be possibly mean.

* * *

 

The Blue Lion limps on through the fight.

One leg might be damaged but they are still in for the long haul. White energy beams burst from the Lion’s tail and catches Galra ships as they hurtle through space.

The explosions are rather satisfying after nearly being downed.

The Red Lion and the Yellow Lion are close by, drawing most of the enemy fire. It gives Blue some sorely needed breathing room, scanning the swarms to pick out the more difficult targets. Allura lets her gaze settle briefly on the unexpected addition that flies side by side with Black.

There are _things_ that she knows, divined by the royal Altean blood that runs through her veins and the mystical connection that ties her to each and every Lion, even before she’d piloted one. There are fundamental truths she knows about the universe.

Her father built the Lions.

Her father built _five_ Lions.

She knows this:

There is no sixth Lion.

She knows this:

There was once a comet that had flown between dimensions and she now sits in a machine built from the ore of that very comet.

She knows this:

Out of all of them, the Black Lion is tethered least to this reality.

She has grown up with the energy of the Lions as a taste of colors on her tongue. This sixth Lion isn’t solid in her senses the way the others are. It carries a tint of purple that buzzes in her mind, a deep purple that forever associated with the Black Lion's quintessential essence.

It feels like an echo pulled from the Lion’s innermost depth.

A white shadow.

* * *

 

Shiro is back.

Holy crow, _Shiro is back._

It’s the thought that keeps circling around Hunk’s head, an ecstatic bit of glee as he smashes the Yellow Lion through another fighter ship. But the anxiety inevitably slips in – it’s ominous, alright? A White Lion appearing out of nowhere, something even Allura hadn’t known existed?

And it’s, well. White. That’s kind of. Well. It’s like a ghost Lion. He can’t help the heebie-jeebies that crawl across his skin every time he gets a glimpse of it outside his cockpit.

Shiro was gone. And now he was back in a Lion that had appeared out of nowhere. That was a ghost thing to do, right?  

Maybe Hunk’s fretting over nothing.

He really hopes that he is. Things will be fine. They just needed to get through this battle and then they’d all go home to the Castleship and everything would be good.

With Shiro’s luck though? It’s sad to say but it probably wasn’t.

* * *

 

Somehow, Lance keeps himself from running his mouth.

This is a good thing because all he had going on was a ceaseless mantra of Shiro’s name going through his brain right now. It wouldn’t look cool to blab that out while he was doing a fantastic job at being an ace pilot and kicking Galra ass with Red. He pulls a fancy corkscrew manoeuvre that he’d only managed once before and shakes a fighter on his tail. He’s about to take it down when-

“Hey!” he yelps indignantly. That was his kill but someone had snagged it right from under him. The White Lion swoops on by.

“Sorry, Lance,” and the amusement was clear over the comms in Shiro’s voice. “You need to be just a little faster.”

Oh my gosh, it was rare but sometimes he’d forgotten that Shiro was perfectly capable of being an insufferable, smug jerk. Lance was flying the Red Lion; there was literally _no way_ he could possibly be any faster and Shiro knows it.

“Come on man,” he whines as he chases after another ship. “I expect that kind of behaviour from _Keith_ , not from you Shiro. Don’t let me down like this.”

It’s a stunning piece of normality, after months of dealing with the gaping hole in the middle of their little space family. For a moment, he forgets all that and just basks in how right, how perfect everything is.

“Hey!” Keith protests like he’s a paragon of purity but Lance knows his number. Mullet-Head isn’t above such dishonourable acts like kill-stealing.

As the White Lion soars away, Shiro says, “Hey Lance? Nice flying.”

* * *

 

Both battleships have been taken out.

The last of the Galra fighters have been destroyed.

Throughout the battle, the Black Lion’s wings had remained gleaming and extended. It hadn’t done more phasing. The dock had lowered with the bayard still in it so Keith wasn’t even sure the Lion would be able to even if he’d wanted it.

He settled back in the pilot’s seat. “That was the last of them,” he said with a sigh of relief. “Good job everyone.”

Then Keith turns his attention to the monitors in front of him, to the new screen that popped up there with a face he hadn’t seen in forever.

“Shiro,” he begins-

_//_

He hears Keith call his name and Shiro looks up with a smile-

_//_

The Black Lion’s wings lose their glow and settle back into their regular form-

_//_

The White Lion vanishes.

_//_

Before his eyes, the White Lion vanishes.

_//_

He sleeps.

* * *

 

It’s late; he’s tired and dead on his feet.

He’s trapped in an endless slumber.

There’s a ghost in the Black Lion’s cockpit.

There’s an entire universe inside the Black Lion.

It’s dark in here.

It’s bright in here.

Outside the Lion, all that can be seen is the hangar.

An endless constellation of purple stars burns brightly above the Lion.

He sits down in the pilot’s seat.

Phantom weight settles by him and even in his sleep, he knows somehow he is not alone.

He places his hands on the controls.

_//_

A connection forms.

_//_

Static crackles.

“Keith?”

“Shiro?”

**Author's Note:**

> Shiro can never catch a break. I don't make the rules - that's canon.
> 
> Sometimes, a story just burns my brain and I spend a day scribbling it down as fast as possible. Also ironically, it was after selecting the title that I realised I'd chosen to write this fic on the September equinox. 
> 
> Inspired by pretty much every beautiful space themed Keith and Shiro fanart I have consumed on the internet. But my brain didn't really feel like doing anything until it was finally kicked into gear by seeing this gorgeous [White Paladin Shiro and White Lion fanart by Owl.](http://grandefinales.tumblr.com/post/165279118863/it-is-said-the-guardian-spirit-of-the-light-only)
> 
> This is set somewhere vaguely in the season 3 timeline. I don't have an exact point because I constantly waver between clone!Shiro and real!Shiro. If clone!Shiro == true, then it's after S2. If real!Shiro == true, then sometime post S3, something goes very, very wrong and he ends up where he is.


End file.
